The Knight Templer

 Saturday Story Strip Day.

In one of the Facebook groups we were talking about the work of artist John Spranger. He had worked at Quality on Plastic Man and graduated to lead assistant to Will Eisner on The Spirit in the post war years and doing he own newspaper strip Bodyguard (later changed to Ben Friday and The Bantam Prince). After keaving the The Bantam Prince (probably because it had drifted too much from it original concept, as written by cartoonist Lariar), he took over The Saint from Mike Roy. Ovre the years his style simplified, but it remained ver well done, until he had some sort of nervous breakdown in the late fifties and had to be (hastily) replaced by Bob Lubbers. Before he took over from Roy, thgere was a period where no one was signing. Because Psranger ahd changed his style, I am not quite sure if he was involved from the beginnen, but he did get to sign his name after a few weeks.

To show the transition and the start of Spranger's run, I have foun dclips from the last signed week of Mike Roy up until the end of the story. Actually I do not have found the end yet, but I would not surprise if it was 13 weeks or so. Ik am sharing the latst months of 1951 here and hope to do the remainder soon.

By the way, I do not have the uncanny abillity of Stefan Wood (of the Facebook Comic Strip Appreciation Group) to blow life into poor microfiche scans. So somewhere around December the quality of this lot dros dramatically, but I think it is still readable.